Judge orders a freeze on firing consumer bureau’s staff and deleting its data.

Days after Trump administration officials fired almost 200 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and ordered the rest to stop their work, a federal judge on Friday ordered a temporary halt to the agency’s dismantling.

Lawyers representing the bureau staff’s union filed court papers early Friday seeking a restraining order to prevent what they described as an imminent dismissal of nearly all employees and the deletion of critical agency data from its computer systems.

“I’m asking that they don’t fire the entire agency tonight,” Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing the union, said in a court hearing on Friday afternoon. “I don’t want to leave the courthouse without some assurance that the mass layoff is not going to happen and then become a fait accompli, and then the government is going to argue, ‘Well, we’ve done it already.’”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington urged Mr. Gupta and a lawyer for the government — Brad Rosenberg, who has worked at the Justice Department for more than 17 years — to work out a deal to delay job cuts and other major actions.

Mr. Rosenberg, who was assigned the case Friday morning, said he needed time to consult with his bosses and see what they would allow him to do. After a delay of more than an hour, he and Mr. Gupta reached an agreement to halt any data erasure and further job cuts until early March.

Judge Jackson signed an order instructing officials at the consumer bureau to not “delete, destroy, remove or impair any data.” It also blocks the agency from firing employees en masse or issuing a “reduction in force” notice — the process the government follows for layoffs — to any consumer bureau employee.